July 21, 2015

 I ignored my alarm again but I managed to read two and a half textbook chapters before lunch. Not bad. The school librarian also called me and we talked for about forty-five minutes about my grant project. She has apparently used Charlie and the Chocolate Factory several times over the years with fifth graders so she had a lot of ideas which was incredibly helpful. She gave me her log in and the fifth grade teacher's log in information for a couple different teacher websites and I was able to find a lot of useful worksheets related to the book. I don't actually need those things but I needed that to help me get my head around the program I was proposing for the grant. It helped being able to actually visualize what I would be having the kids do. And it kind of makes me want to print a lot of that stuff out when I read the book and work through the activities.

This masters program would be a lot harder if I didn't have the connections I have at the elementary school. And there is a good chance I wouldn't even be in the program if I wasn't working at the school. I was thinking about it but the school librarian convinced me (and mildly pestered me) into applying. And she and the principal wrote my recommendations. I don't who I would have gotten to write my recommendations if I didn't know them because all of my connections at the theater had quit long ago. And now that I am in the program, I have better experiences to reference in various assignment, along with skills I have acquired working on different projects at work. And being able to get advice, not only from the school librarian, but also from other teachers. I wish I had gone back to school a lot earlier but I don't know if I would have been as successful. Taking so long was frustrating but maybe it was necessary.

This afternoon and into the night I worked on my grant proposal. And thanks to the help from the school librarian, I was able to finish. And I think I'm going to call it good but I'm still not quite sure about a couple of the sections because they are worded really strange. One is called Measurable Results and the other is Assessment Methods. The short explanations are vague and it seems like there is some overlap. It's confusing. I might ask the professor about it this weekend if I get the chance.

Tomorrow I need to figure out the poster presentation. The goal is to actually come up with all the content I want to put on the poster and print it out. Or at least attempt to print it out and see if my printer has enough ink. And if I could figure this out before I go pick up Chipotle, I could leave a little early and swing by the store while I'm out. I doubt I actually get that far though because I still have no idea what should go on the poster. It feels like a lot of space to fill. We'll see. The slightly more realistic goal is to finish the content before I go to bed tomorrow, and maybe try to print it. I'd be really impressed with myself if I made it that far.

During one of my breaks from the grant proposal tonight I made a small edit to my group website, adding a copyright logo, the client name, and the year to the bottom of all the pages. One of my group members was looking through the requirements for the site and messaged me about it tonight to see if I had everything on the site because he wasn't sure about some of the stuff. I went back through and the previous two assignments because we had to include all the required elements from those assignments as well as the required elements for this assignment. The only thing that had been missing from this assignment was the Google Analytics stuff, which I added yesterday. And the only thing I was missing from the first assignment was the copyright stuff. So we're good now. Until we get feedback from other groups. And until I finally get around to looking at the SEO article we were given and see if there is more stuff I need to add. Hopefully not.

And certainly not tonight because it is almost half past three in the morning and I should get to bed. I'm feeling like I'm going to go lay down and not fall asleep for another hour but there's only one way to find that out.